THE FALL OF SPYDOM
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Quantavolution and Revolution

or how the Author's controversial theory, which is shown to be related to ideas of I. Velikovsky and Chris Marx and some others, including Karl Marx, can be explained, and also why revolutions of the Earth's crust and motions and the origins of species are not the same as political revolutions, but the conflicts among rebels, clerics, and scholars over both concepts get all mixed up, so that they can be confused and deemed by police and other investigators to bear significant coincidences.

CHRISTOPH is not a violent man. I never even heard him talk about violence in contemporary affairs or to advocate it, although he would speak of the violence of events in Venusian times, thousands of years ago and the violence since then produced by the star's lingering mnemonic malignant influence. He does not read spy-stories but is fetched by stories and films of cosmic encounters.

"There are simple actions, but never simple explanations": Maxim #20.

His penchant for etyms -- inspired by that untranslatable genius, Arno Schmidt -- proves to be fertile here, too. Let me quote from a letter to Dr. Gary Schwartzenberg, the feisty Editor of the magazine Kronos, who for the moment at least is a sworn enemy of mine (oaths do not mean much among the Cosmic Heretics).

His points are well-taken. There are connections among the medieval epithet for Mary, the violet, violate (in the sense of rape, break agreements, trespass), the violet-scarved Christian evangelists in their massed assemblies, and also the veil of the nun and the viol and violin.

Here is something that you can check in yourself. The archaeo-astronomer and Catholic priest, Xavier Kugler, writing in 1927, bound up sexuality and violence with planet Venus in ancient times in connection with the "Song of Songs", which you probably know from the Bible. He matches the bride with, among numerous other endearments, the Sun, the Moon, and the army in battle, none other than Venus as the Morning Star. Why so martial?

Kugler here does not guess, but elsewhere he finds Venus connected with the greatest disaster in the memory of the ancient world, the Phaeton myth of the destruction of the Earth by a great burning comet.

He makes another neat discovery, that the elapsed time of 285 days between the disappearance of Venus behind the Sun and its reemergence as the evening star and rise to its peak of brilliance corresponds very closely to the period of gestation of women, calculating from the first day of the last menstruation to the day of birth. This, Kugler believes, must be the basis for the connection between Venus and sexuality, and a main reason for worshipping the planet, this remarkable coincidence.

Thus, by ancient and modern cult practice, the bride, too, disappears from society, goes on a honeymoon, as Venus passes behind the Sun, and when she reappears is pregnant and gives birth in a climax of illumination. The 285 days are over. Upon her wedding, the bride wears a veil as Venus is veiled by the Sun. There is more. Kugler has been called a "reluctant catastrophist," by the British scholar, Malcolm Lowery. Lowery prefers to believe that the Venus-sexuality-violence correlation is produced by the human mind playing upon such neat coincidences. One has to ask, as I have in the correlation between the female menstrual period and the Moon cycle, whether the 285-day coincidence might be psycho-somatically determined. Might not the human gestation period be regulated at least to some degree by an intense desire to emulate the Great Goddess?

One needs to recall how forcible was this Venus fixation. Unless one knows the force of mind over body (psychosomatism), one can hardly accept this proposition. By the same token, unless one knows the physical and social evidence of a Venus-provoked catastrophe of Earth, one can hardly believe there was the provocation for such psychosomatism.

I cannot resist pointing out, as evidence of the force of Venus, the eunuch cults of Venus in various cultures, the virgin cults of Venus, the sacred prostitute cults of Venus, cults of infant sacrifices to Venus, and conscious (as opposed to unconscious holocaust) human sacrifices to Venus, not to mention a number of more light-hearted activities in Her Name.

As to the universal employment of the emblem of the star, whether five, six, or eight facets are depicted, the source is in the astronomical movements of Venus. Such was the conclusion of a remarkable study by the Basle University Professor of Astronomy, Dr. Martin Knapp, back in 1934. And please note the reverence for these stars in the flags and banners of Israel, Islam, the USSR, China, and the USA. The World's huge armies march under the Star of Venus. You can begin to understand the obsession of Marx with the obsession of humanity with this planet.

Still, it is I, rather than Marx, who talks about violence then and violence now. Therefore I am the one whom the police should be watching, and for all I know they may be watching me at this very moment. (Shall I close my shutters, do you think? And cut off the view of the vine-limned and pine-clad, white limestone cliffs running above me? Never!)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have generally been claimed as boosters of Darwinism and Lyellism, that is, of the theory that the universe, Earth, life, and man, as we see them, have come about through multitudinous tiny increments of change, over a great long time, from the primordial clouds of gas or ooze or whatever the beginning was supposed to have been like.

Inasmuch as Marx and Engels were at the same time famous proponents of revolution as the necessary way to arrive at fundamental change in politics, it seemed to me that they might have paused before gobbling up the new uniformitarian doctrines of their times in regard to natural history.

Engels was delighted with Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), and told Marx so. Marx was suspicious at first, and in a perspicacious sentence called the Darwinian theory a typical product of English bourgeois ideology. He was a smart man, this Karl, a hard man to fool. Still the destructive impact of darwinism upon conventional religion could not help but arouse the greatest enthusiasm among socialists, who were fighting the religious establishments.

Later on, much later, it was claimed that Marx had even written Darwin asking for permission to dedicate a volume of the English edition of Das Kapital to him, which in a polite reply Darwin had refused.

It had seemed to me for a decade that there was a contradiction between the convinced darwinism of the great revolutionist and his belief in revolution as the necessary condition of fundamental political reform (a belief, incidentally that is shared by Lasswellians generally). Does the whole world change by tiny degrees over millions of years, while politics alone needs to change by saltation?

Furthermore, when it came time to utilize Darwinism in politics it was the conservative and reactionary factions who connected the ideas of survival of the fittest, adaptation, incremental change, and slowly-working laws of economics together in an anti-communist political theory.

I finally proposed to the National Science Foundation an investigation of what seemed to me an important paradox, and received a resounding rejection of the idea. My best information would indicate that the almost joyous contempt expressed for my idea was attributable to three motives: the professional Marxist was defending his turf (there is only so much swag to distribute and an outsider should be kept out); second, the devout believer in darwinism and uniformitarianism was indignant at this attempt to carve away part of his supporters by theoretical argumentation; and third, the historian of science clung to the belief that Marx and Engels had no scruples in believing darwinism, for otherwise he, the historian, would have to correct his yellowed notes.

This situation typifies why I am sometimes associated with the extreme right despite the fact that they are crazy, wrong, and dangerous: they do shake up bureaucracies like the NSF, NASA, State, and put them into an anxious sweat. They do jeer at the sanctimonious Foundations who believe that liberalism is a scientific fact and, worse, that a scientific fact is a scientific fact. Pshaw on the half-baked "scientific" mind!

Then at the same time as I was rebuffed, and independently of any work of mine, it was shown that Karl Marx had never written the letter to Darwin, that it had originated in the early years of Bolshevism in Russia, and that Isaiah Berlin, now a British Knight, had copied it and circulated it in English. I have pointed this out in writings that have circulated very circumspectly in the Soviet Union.

I would be afraid that, if the idea of this great paradox were to seize the Soviet scientists, who, whatever their field of knowledge, have been darwinians in the vast number, they might make too sharp a turn in their operating philosophy of science and in consequence lend staunch support to the theory that the only way to bring important changes to the world is by saltation, leaps forward, and, pari passu, conquest of the capitalist world by force should be prepared for and expected.

I, on the other hand, believing in saltation in human affairs as well as in nature, according to the theory that I call quantavolution, have been occupied intensively in how to bring about revolution without heavy violence. I am still not ready to accept this ultimate Machiavellian and Lasswellian thesis.

For violence is a crude method of change, in human affairs as in nature by natural catastrophe. Its costs are excessive by any criterion except, as I have stressed, that of the fundamentalist religions of the world and their secular stand-ins, among them most of Christianity and Islam, who, by promising eternal pleasure in Heaven following death in the cause of Cult, are able to out-weigh the most onerous and terrible burdens and effects of violence.

Granted this one large reservation against violence in human affairs, I am eager to get my stuff into the Soviet Union -- which writer is not? -- and I don't even care if they pay me anything for it -- I don't make any money in the West on it, for that matter.

So Chris Marx with his friendly connections and his favorable attitude to the theory of quantavolution could be an excellent conduit for my subversive material to arrive in the Soviet Union; as to whom it is and would appear subversive, I am uncertain. Perhaps both the USA and the USSR types will be trying to block the flow of quantavolutionary ideas, which would have to continue to go to China and India.

And what did the Swiss police find when they searched the home and offices of Marx: an inventory of my books on quantavolution. In them I say quite clearly that the word "revolution" might be preferable as the alternative to "evolution" except that it has connotations of violence and politics that would certainly make even more difficult the task of persuading the scientific world of the utility of our theories.

Even among the groups dedicated to the study and spread of "the theories of quantavolution and revolution in science and natural history," there is a great reluctance to let these words fall from their lips. It is interesting that they have similar problems with the word "catastrophe" but will let themselves use this word, although its connotations should be much worse than those of the term "revolution," for where would we all be but slaves under one system or another if our ancestors, wherever they may have been, some of them anyhow, did not rise up in revolt and bring about a revolution?

At least Chris Marx does not hold back, and feels perfectly free with the words "revolution" and "quantavolution," and reproaches the others for timidity and covering-up. But it may have cost us something when the Swiss police (and whoever might be working with them) came upon these words of high suspect.

I can hear their words of inquiry now: "What kind of Revolution is this American professor, Alexander Falcone, who lives in your jurisdiction, advocating? Has he caused any trouble recently? Is he on your suspect list? Has he ever been?"

This will go to the appropriate desk in Washington, Bombay, Marseilles, Athens and other places where we hang out (see list of travels in the preceding chapter), and before long the local secret services will be communicating with one another, sending snippets of information, garbled biographies with inherent contradictions that must be unraveled by further correspondence and by a conference or two among the inquirers to assemble their data and report on progress and institute a collaborative investigation, valuable reviews of books that few read, together with lists of articles of intriguing title found in obscure libraries and therefore requested under emergency procedures through the front organization for these purposes to obtain works such as "Targeting Elites" and "Propaganda to Audiences Abroad." (Nothing like a Secret Service request to make a librarian shake his-her behind -- apropos, are you aware that librarians are highly sexed as a rule? It may have to do with the static electrical charges in stuffy stacks, or the deep still wines that books, like bottles, contain.)

Jerzy Kosinski, whose sardonic literary genius skipped over from Poland to America, had me laughing over lunch at my place one time about how he cleared quickly through the holiday airport jam coming into Paris.

When I get to Kennedy Airport, he says, I send a telegram to the Police Headquarters at Orly Field. (This was before Charles De Gaulle Airport was built.) It says `Passenger J. Kosinski arriving on Pan American 022.' When the plane arrives, I am called out by name and am first off the plane, with a police escort. They take me, with only hard glances, because they don't know what is up, straight through the Passport Counters to the baggage room and as soon as my bags come in they help me search through it and usher me out the door, calling a cab for me and making sure that they know where I am staying. I am all clear in a few minutes.

As for me, Alex Falcone, I should warrant an even larger équipe for my arrivals and departures. And if only the superpower secret services, as well as those of the smaller powers, should censor my works these would certainly then get the hearing that they deserve.

So it would seem that I am employing my friend Marx as an agent provocateur for World Revolution, Kalos, or is it World Revolution as Quantavolution. It doesn't really matter; both are of worldwide importance and both should spread as widely as possible as quickly as possible, the one to reform the presently dislocated and disastrous world order of politics, the other to swing the balance of science over to the new paradigm of quantavolution, the new world order of science.

For decades now, ever since leaving the army, I have wandered about looking for beneficent revolutionary elements in society, but as conditions have gotten worse, such ones have become fewer.

Where are the World Spies, those who watch over and work for the whole world instead of their street-corner, their town, their ethnic group and cult, their country, their region, their race, their ideological trap, their Venus Trap? So few they are.

We kill millions in war, and prepare to kill many millions more. Meanwhile these latter millions, our armies, navies, marines and air force, effectually are civilly castrated for life. They are forbidden to end their lives saying that they served for the betterment of mankind. And it is treason in every country in the world to go tell these myriads of military just this, that socially they might as well be dead on the battlefield as living their lives. They are non-entities whether they are watching the gauges and listening to the beeps in Iowa or whether they are sharpening and polishing their spears in Somalia.

We need, this world does, better and more small farmers, artisans, manual workers, careful clerks, patient police, inventors, designers, artists, writers, film-makers, helpers to everyone who has a personal problem, anti-antagonists. Antagonism belongs in sports, with recognized and enforced limits to how deadly serious the competition can be; I spent some of the most pleasurable times of my life swimming, really lolling in and by the waters of the world, only to live to hear tonight on television the latest scheme, a German one, to make a swimmer fast by pumping air up his (or her) asshole to lend buoyancy during a race.

At this brink of madness, races must be halted and we must send our designers back to the drawing boards for new forms of competition: it is easier and better to present the world with new games than to corrupt it with incremental technical perversions of the old games.

Times like these make me wish for a god who would support me. But, no, others always manage to make a Greater Claim upon Him. Like Monsignor Lefebvre. So, as my Father would occasionally mutter, "What's the use?", puzzling his young son, to whom this sentence uttered vacantly into high space came to mean a combination of "Everything seems to lead to nowhere," and "There's nothing that can be done about it."

Yet there must come from somewhere a revolutionary element, a generalized aggregation of Kalisti, if there is to be a genuine revolution.

Now to the extent that the intelligentsia, the philosophers, the scientists, the educators, the readers, editors, journalists, christian scientists, ethical culturalists, quakers, freethinkers, masonry, civic leaders, party politicians, politists, students, social gospelers, men-and-women-above-partisanship, social planners, architects- of-new-orders, utopians, computer designers, intelligentsia, artificial intelligentsers, renovators, expert-systematizers, innovators, inventors, club-of-romers, futurists, social explorers, neo-omnists, neo-fundamentalists, reformers, progressives, kalists, kalis, kalisti, kalotists, faculties, professionals, red-tape-cutters, troublemakers, eidotropists, science-fictioners, visionaries, levellers, diggers, atlanteans, lets-get-down-to-businessmen, lets-role-up-our sleevers, wonder-landers, ideates, concocters, regenerators, reonstructionists, soul-servers, radicals, revolutionaries, quantavolutionaries, rectifiers, removers, remodellers, renewers, therapists, activists, propagandists, agitators, and creators take it upon themselves to revolutionize and kalotize the world, the violence-mongers will step aside until they are absorbed into the universal process and come to love it like the rest.